Everything offered to me is humiliation, and that is not what I asked for

Almost everything offered to me in three years has been some form of humiliation, it is not what I asked for, and I have come to suspect the real problem is that I have no good way of saying what I do want. Respectful authority sounds like a contradiction written down. It is not one. It is a woman deciding things and expecting them done, with no part of it depending on my being made small first.

Thirty one, Queens, I teach music at two schools and I am tired in a specific way that anybody who teaches will recognise.

My one dynamic ran eight months and ended over precisely this. She was not cruel and she had not misled me. We simply meant different things by the same words, and by the time either of us noticed we had built four months of routine on top of the misunderstanding and neither wanted to be the one who said so.

So I would rather be tediously specific in advance. Duties, standards, being answerable for how I live, a woman whose decisions settle a question. Correction, plainly, including when it stings. Nothing that requires me to be degraded in order to make the authority legible.

Not looking to be told that what I want is not really submission, which I have had twice and which is a strange thing to say to a man about his own life. Not looking for a woman who finds this too tame, and there is no hard feeling in that whatsoever. Not looking to spend another eight months discovering we meant different things.